About Creative Packaging Inc.

PROVIDING PACKAGING SOLUTIONS SINCE 1990

Creative Packaging is an independently owned packaging company centrally located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Michael W. Bell, owner and president, has over 25 years experience in the packaging industry. Patricia Meek, operations and customer service manager, has been with Creative Packaging since 1993, giving her 14 years of experience in the packaging business. With our warehouse, fabrication and delivery staff, we offer a dedicated and close relationship with our customers, with a high emphasis on customer service.

Creative Packaging has provided quality package design and fabrication services to a long list of satisfied, repeat customers. We pride ourselves on providing a package design that protects your product fully, without incurring damage and loss during the shipping process. Return of damaged product from a customer to its supplier can cause loss of goodwill as well as costing the supplier money. We aim to alleviate this problem with our design to protect your product. Please check our Foam Fabrication / Die Cutting page for examples of our designs.

Creative Packaging also offers a large variety of packaging material and supplies, please check our products page for details.

We look forward to hearing from you, please feel free to contact us at 888-371-7225 with any questions.

Company at Home with Foam

Featured Business, The Tulsa World

Creative Packaging Inc. wraps up a solid customer base with a variety of materials and ideas.

Mike Bell, owner of Creative Packaging Inc., uses the polyethylene foam stacked behind him to make a variety of custom packaging products at the company he founded 19 years ago.

To those who know him well, Mike Bell is the "foam man."

The nickname was bestowed in jest, but it's the nicest compliment the Tulsa businessman could hope for.

At his company, Creative Packaging Inc., Bell sells hundreds of different packing materials.

The Tulsa native is also the innovative mind behind every unique request for packaging containers. In other words, Bell invents the things customers need to ship, store and display almost everything under the sun.

From the simplest plastic poly bag to the more complicated aspects of polyurethane, polyethylene, polystyrene and polypropylene foam, Bell said Creative Packaging can handle any project.

Who would have believed there are that many kinds of foam in the world? But their varying properties can fill any number of packing specifications.

"They all have different cushioning characteristics, and they all do different things," Bell said.

Polyurethane soaks up water, but polyethylene doesn't. Polystyrene floats, making it the perfect material for boat docks and home spa covers. And polyethylene is the foam of choice for a local museum that uses it for storing fragile pottery.

Cushioning and protective foam has an indefinite number of uses, but it's just part of what the company supplies.

"We try to be like a Wal-Mart to our customers," said operations manager Patricia Meek, explaining that Creative Packaging's goal is to provide everything any company might need.

"Then customers don't have to call one person for a box and another for tape," Meek said. "We're like a packaging supermarket -- that's what customers like."

Bell thrives on being everything to everyone.

After 12 years in real estate and five years working as a sales representative for another packaging company, he decided to start his own company in 1990 with a $20,000 loan from his father.

His selling expertise was already established -- "I'm a natural-born salesperson, even as a child," Bell said -- and he was fascinated by the dynamics of consumable products.

"It's the never-ending prospect of selling things people need every day," he said.

Business grew along with each unique packaging request, and as different materials were added to Creative Packaging's inventory.

"People would say, `Here's my product. I need to ship it and have it arrive in one piece,' " Bell said.

And for 25 years, that's what he has done.

When Bell isn't selling his imaginative services to prospective customers or discussing an idea with clients, he is devising new methods of packing machine parts and sensitive electronics.

Part of that process can include dozens of endurance tests, where Bell drops a product hundreds of times until a specially crafted container survives the impact with no damage to what's inside.

"This is what I love to do," he said.

Bell moved the company into its 20,000- square-foot site on Charles Page Boulevard at the end of 2000, picking the industrial neighborhood as one means of keeping costs down for customers.

The move also made room for equipment that came with the purchase of another Tulsa company that same year.

The acquisition of Davis International added about 100 customers to Creative Packaging's client base, but most importantly, it gave Bell the capacity to make more products on site with machines that cut boxes to size, slice foam into different thicknesses, and die-cut foam into varying forms.

Yet Bell is so involved in designing and inventing -- his latest creation is a foam-filled "hail blanket" to protect cars and trucks during severe weather -- that he needs to add several experienced packaging sales representatives to his staff of six in-house employees.

"We're looking to grow," he said -- a rarity these days in an economy that has companies downsizing and cutting jobs.

"It's a great business to be in, because the need for the products we sell is go great."